NECC roundup (was ATTN: Marty Billingsley)

[Marty Billingsley]

Judy Perry <jperryl at ecs.fullerton.edu> writes:
> Marty ( et al ):
>
> Now that NECC 2005 is an in-the-past kind of thing, do you have any
> reports of how it went and/or any online summarization of how your
> presentation went?
>
> I'd like to post it for my fellow grads in the MS in Instructional Design
> and Technology program....

Hi Judy (and anyone else who's interested) --

Here's the online blurb about our session:
<http://center.uoregon.edu/ISTE/NECC2005/program/search_results_details.php?sessionid=7376008>

Basically, each of us got eight minutes to show off our favorite
multimedia authoring tool.  I touted RunRev; others demonstrated Flash,
eZedia, CREATE Together, and Blackspace.

There were about 75 people in the audience; most of them were seeking an
alternative to HyperStudio in the K-8 classroom.  In this environment I
didn't get much chance to show off RR's greatest strength: the easy
scripting language.  I also didn't get much chance to talk about how I use
RR in the classroom: as an introductory programming environment.

I showed a simple informational stack made with RR, which is what many in
the audience will probably want to do or to have their students do.
Based on the geography of Europe, the stack included images, label fields
that show and hide as the user rolls over parts of the map, info fields
and flag images that show up when the user clicks on countries, etc.  It
also included a quiz that deomonstrated the ease of doing random sorting
and using sounds.  Very simple stuff, nothing fancy.

I snuck in a few glimpses of my students' work -- couldn't resist -- to
show some more advanced things RR could create.  My curriculum is
games-based, so many of my students' projects weren't really relevant in
that setting, but they're much cooler than straightforward multimedia
projects.

The audience seemed appreciative, but perhaps a little dazed by so much
information at one time.  (They saw similar presentations on five
different software packages.)  More effective, perhaps, would be a
day-long workshop where participants get an hour of hands-on instruction
in each multimedia environment.  Then they'd really have the background to
choose which software to use in their classroom.

Using RR as a multimedia tool isn't the focus of what I teach students.
Maybe for NECC 2006 I can put together a session on using RR to teach
programming, but don't know if the logistics of a San Diego trip is
feasible. :-)

cheers,
  - marty

--
Marty Billingsley (marty at ucls.uchicago.edu)
The University of Chicago Laboratory Schools